Somalia is home to two secret US drone bases – report

Up to 120 US military personnel are operating out of two secret drone bases in Somalia, carrying out attacks on Al-Shabab militants and working with African Union peacekeepers, a new report has revealed.

Somali officials have confirmed a secretive US presence in the
southern port city of Kismayo, according to Foreign Policy
correspondent Ty McCormick. Another base, at the airfield of
Baledogle near Mogadishu, is being used for both drone strikes
and for contractors training Somali security forces.

Regional administration official Abdighani Abdi Jama told
McCormick that as many as 40 US personnel conduct
“intelligence” and “counterterrorism”
operations and operate drones from their base at Kismayo airport,
about 300 miles south of Mogadishu. Somali officials and sources
within the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) also
indicated a similar presence at Baledogle, in the Lower Shebelle
region.

Washington has not officially admitted to operating drones from
Somali territory, with drone flights said to originate from US
bases in the neighboring Djibouti, and outposts in Kenya and
Ethiopia. The US also has an outpost in the Seychelles, an
archipelago some 800 miles off the Somali coast.

US Africa Command (AFRICOM) spokesman Chuck Prichard declined to
comment on the size or location of their units, saying only that
the “small number” of US Special Forces deployed the
region was “not tasked with directly engaging enemy
forces.”

“The exact nature of this support, weapons systems or number
of personnel involved in these operations cannot be disclosed in
order to protect the integrity of these operations and the safety
of units in the region,” Prichard wrote in an email to
Foreign Policy.

US forces have conducted drone and helicopter attacks against
Al-Shabab since 2007. An American drone killed the group’s leader Ahmed Abdi Godane in 2014.

On more than one occasion, US special operations teams have
staged their attacks from bases belonging to Kenyan and Ugandan
forces within AMISOM says McCormick, citing anonymous sources
from within the peacekeeping mission.

“They come to our forward operating bases and sometimes do
joint operations with us,” said one Ugandan source. “We
often don’t get much notice,” he added. “They don’t
trust us, and we don’t trust them.”

According to the Bureau of Investigative Journalists, up to
105 people may have been killed in US drone strikes in Somalia,
of which there have been no more than 13 since 2007. Most of them
were not civilians. Other covert operations killed between 40 and
141 people, with civilians making seven to 47 of them.

Since 2007, Washington has spent almost $1 billion on funding
AMISOM, $500 million directly and another $455 million through
the UN. That has reportedly helped the African Union troops turn
the tide against Al-Shabab, reducing their control from 60
percent of Somalian territory in 2010 to reportedly only 6
percent today.

According to Bronwyn Bruton, from the Atlantic Council’s Africa
Center, Al-Shabab has simply changed the way it operates and
remains a dangerous force to be reckoned with. “They are not
actually confronting AMISOM head-on anymore, which means that
their forces and weapons are mostly intact,” she told
McCormick. “They have shifted from a conventional force to a
pure terrorist one that is increasingly focusing its attention on
attacks outside of Somalia, in Kenya, and elsewhere in the
region.”